


wherever the wind may take you, whatever fate may find you

by scornandivory



Category: Dishonored (Video Games)
Genre: (they're all bisexual and you may personally fight me on this), Gen, Post DotO, five feet apart because they're not gay, sittin on a rooftop, so as u can tell this is spr srs, spoilers for doto, two broooooos, working title was the void isnt returning my calls so now i gotta find a different gd sugar momma
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-02-10
Updated: 2019-02-10
Packaged: 2019-10-25 07:42:35
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,289
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17720996
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/scornandivory/pseuds/scornandivory
Summary: it is a difficult thing to be human. luckily, the man who was once the outsider thinks he might be in good company.





	wherever the wind may take you, whatever fate may find you

It is a strange thing to be human. To be cold, to be hungry. Gravity. Pain. Disgusting, mortal things. His now, though. Centuries of being a god and the Void had spat him out like a broken tooth, plunging him headfirst back into skin that tore and feet that cramped. Was this the way of the world, then? The rise and fall of its players to some silent whalesong? It may have been foolish, he thinks with the clarity of hindsight, to assume that he could have been the one at the conductor’s stand; and yet, how could he not have? Had he not made the world tremble for his amusements? Had he not dipped his fingertips into the vast, roiling ocean of terror that existed just beyond what mortal men could comprehend and walked away unaltered? Was that not divinity? Was that power not the pulsing, wretched heart that fueled all creation?

“Stop sulking and pay attention,” Emily said, planting a boot in the juncture between his ribcage and his hip, hard enough to jostle him but not enough to wound. “I’m complaining about my loyal advisors and I need you to suggest extravagant, impossible, cruel things that I won’t ever actually do but will almost certainly imagine repeatedly to get me through the next few meetings.”

He rubbed his side, the slight ache Emily’s footwear had left rising and falling under the movement of his fingers. He had not been sulking. He was just suddenly very young with centuries of thoughts to sort through, which was difficult as he could no longer simply store parts of his mind in the void. He wasn’t sure how humans did it, all those chaotic little notions in so little space. “I marked a girl, once, a hundred years ago in a land whose name you couldn’t pronounce. She wanted revenge on her brother, not because she hated him, but because she loved him and he had left her alone in their parent’s house--one passion so easily gives in to another, it seems. She tracked him down to the next town over, where he had found work as a barman. She cursed him so that one of his taps ran only with blood and the other spat out flies and maggots.”

“Your suggestion is that I serve my council blood and insect larvae,” Emily said, giving him a blank look. “We’re in Dunwall. That’s basically a delicacy here.”

The man—or, the thing recognized as a man? He had always been addressed by "he" but it was strange to be slotted back into human whims like gender and the immutable physical—who was once the Outsider shrugged slightly, an awful habit he had picked up from Billie. “I was a dark patron to those who wished most fervently for the wickedest of magics. I rarely...pranked.”

Emily sighed and flopped back onto the Summer-warm stone of the palace’s roof and turned her head slightly as though appreciating the view. She wasn’t, of course. The city was near invisible under the haze of smoke and mist and dusk, but Emily had apparently figured gazing solemnly off into the distance was a polite way to not have to look directly at anyone else without seeming dismissive. The man kept his eyes on her, because she was the most interesting thing on the roof. He wondered if she knew she was staring in the direction where, miles away, lay the shore of Karnaca. He imaged she had to. Tragedy and trauma were lodestars for humans; they always found their way back.

She had, within months of her return, introduced a motion to shift Dunwall from a monarchy to a democracy. The more self-interested nobles, which was nearly all of them, had pushed back, but Emily was bound to succeed. For one, she was Emily. For another, it was difficult to force an Empress who did not want to be Empress to remain on her throne, especially one whose ascension and reign had been so marked by bloodshed and turmoil. Emily had sensed the sun setting on her rule and chosen to step gracefully out of the way. The man couldn’t wait until she had finished cutting herself free of the tangled roots of her lineage; he had watched a world full of places that did not intentionally seek to harm her slowly come into existence and found himself strangely eager to show it to her. Perhaps he merely missed the freedom of the sea that he had lost when Billie had bluntly but not unkindly told him that she was leaving him to the recently re-coronated Empress of Dunwall, who could afford to keep a former god with no particular craft beyond sinister turns of phrase much better than she could.

Emily, for her part, had only muttered something about continually associating with people who had a hand in her mother’s assassination before handing him off to a terrified servant to get sorted.

He sighed, drawing himself back into the conversation. “Have you considered just implying that your illustrious sire is hiding in the rafters, waiting to drop sword first on the unsuspecting.”

“I’ve been doing that. It’s lost its spark.” She shifted and turned back to face him, her eyes Void-dark in the low light. “How would you feel about standing eerily behind me and smiling vaguely whenever someone says something stupid? You’re so good at that.”

He looked at her and smiled vaguely. She huffed at him. “I’m still your Empress, you know. The gallows are right… well, everywhere. It’s an aesthetic disaster.”

“Truly the greatest horror that has ever been wrought upon this land,” he agreed solemnly.

“You know, I don't know how to feel about you developing a sense of humor. Although I suppose you’ve always had a sense of humor and now you’re adjusting for the fact you can’t light a fire under human civilization and then sit back and watch the smoke.” Her hand, the one with his mark a dull scar across the back, twitched ever so slightly.

“It’s true. I have nothing to feel superior to other than rats and flies, and they’ll get the last laugh when they’re picking my bones dry.”

“You can feel superior to Lady Whitehall,” Emily said charitably. “She’s awful to her dogs and she keeps leaning into me when she laughs to grab my arm. I think she’s trying to seduce me. It’s terrible.”

The man smiled ever so slightly. “What a catch--an Empress in the process of deposing herself.”

Emily kicked him again. “You haven’t seemed to mind.”

The implications of her answer were delicious, and not yet ready to be discussed. He felt a very mortal thrill go up his spine at the idea that soon Emily would be free of her crown and could head out into the parts of the world that didn’t know her name and had no reason to care to. The possibilities swirled, so much better--so much more interesting--for not knowing which ones would come true. Perhaps they would join her father in the retirement he longed for and grow old in Karnaca, but most likely... not. Emily had a world to meet, and he had a new existence to fill. He could see her on the bow of a ship, sunlit, flanked by Wyman and himself as she directed them into brave new worlds through the comforting lull of the ocean and the calls of the whales.

Such strange serendipity that they should have met when they did, he on the verge of his mortality being given back to him and her on the verge of defining her humanity. Such extraordinary creatures, so temporary, so mortal, so beautiful.


End file.
